#NovNov24 Catch-Up, I: Comyns, Figes, McEwan, Radcliffe, Thériault
Still more to finish reading and/or belatedly review this week before the Novellas in November link-up closes – another, er, nine books after this, I think! I’ll save the short nonfiction for a couple of other posts. For now I have five novellas that range from black comedy to utter heartbreak and from quotidian detail to magic realism.
The House of Dolls by Barbara Comyns (1989)
What a fantastic opening line: “Amy Doll, are you telling me that all those old girls upstairs are tarts?” Amy is a respectable widow and single mother to Hetty; no one would guess her boarding house is a brothel where gentlemen of a certain age engage the services of Berti, Evelyn, Ivy and the Señora. When a policeman starts courting Amy, she feels it’s time to address her lodgers’ profession and Hetty’s truancy. The older women disperse: move, marry or seek new employment. Sequences where Berti, who can barely boil an egg, tries to pass as a cook for a highly exacting couple, and Evelyn gets into the gin while babysitting, are hilarious. But there is pathos to the spinsters’ plight as well. “The thing that really upset [Berti] was her hair, long wisps of white with blazing red ends which she kept hidden under a scarf. The fact that she was penniless, and with no prospects, had become too terrible to contemplate.” She and Evelyn take to attending the funerals of strangers for the free buffet and booze. Comyns’ last novel (I’d only previously read Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead) is typically dark, but the wit counteracts the morbid nature. It reminded me of Beryl Bainbridge, late Barbara Pym, Lore Segal, and Muriel Spark. (Passed on by Liz – thank you! Even with the hideous cover.) [156 pages] 
Light by Eva Figes (1983)
I read this as part of my casual ongoing project to read books from my birth year. This was recently reissued and I can see why it is considered a lost classic and was much admired by Figes’ fellow authors. A circadian novel, it presents Claude Monet and his circle of family, friends and servants at home in Giverny. The perspective shifts nimbly between characters and the prose is appropriately painterly: “The water lilies had begun to open, layer upon layer of petals folded back to the sky, revealing a variety of colour. The shadow of the willow lost depth as the sun began to climb, light filtering through a forest of long green fingers. A small white cloud, the first to be seen on this particular morning, drifted across the sky above the lily pond”. There are also neat little hints about the march of time: “‘Telephone poles are ruining my landscapes,’ grumbled Claude”. But this story takes plotlessness to a whole new level, and I lost patience far before the end, despite the low page count, and so skimmed half or more. If you are a lover of lyrical writing and can tolerate stasis, it may well be your cup of tea. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project?) [91 pages] 
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2007)
“They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Another stellar opening line to what I think may be a perfect novella. Its core is the night in July 1962 when Edward and Florence attempt to consummate their marriage in a Dorset hotel, but it stretches back to cover everything we need to know about this couple – their family dynamics, how they met, what they want from life – and forward to see their lives diverge. Is love enough? “And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself. Nothing much at all.” I had forgotten the sources of trauma: Edward’s mother’s brain injury, perhaps a hint that Florence was sexually abused by her father? (But she also says things that would today make us posit asexuality.) I knew when I read this at its release that it was a superior McEwan, but it’s taken the years since – perhaps not coincidentally, the length of my own marriage – to realize just how special. It’s a maturing of the author’s vision: the tragedy is not showy and grotesque like in his early novels and stories, but quiet, hinging on the smallest of actions, or the words not said. This absolutely flayed me emotionally on a reread. (Little Free Library) [166 pages] 
The Old Haunts by Allan Radcliffe (2023)
I was sent this earlier in the year in a parcel containing the 2024 McKitterick Prize shortlist. It’s been instructive to observe the variety just in that set of six (and so much the more in the novels I’m assessing for the longlist now). The short, titled chapters feel almost like linked flash stories that switch between the present day and scenes from art teacher Jamie’s past. Both of his parents having recently died, Jamie and his boyfriend, a mixed-race actor named Alex, get away to remote Scotland. His parents were older when they had him; growing up in the flat above their newsagent’s shop in Edinburgh, Jamie felt the generational gap meant they couldn’t quite understand him or his art. Uni in London was his chance to come out and make supportive friends, but being honest with his parents seemed a step too far. When Alex is called away for an audition, Jamie delves deeper into his memories. Kit, their host at the cottage, has her own story. Some lovely, low-key vignettes and passages (“A smell of soaked fruit. Christmas cake. My mother liked to be organised. She was here, alive, only yesterday.”), but overall a little too soft for the grief theme to truly pierce through. [158 pages]
With thanks to the Society of Authors for the free copy for review.
The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Thériault (2005; 2008)
[Translated from the French by Liedewy Hawke]
{BEWARE SPOILERS} Like many, I was drawn in by the quirky title and Japan-evoking cover. To start with, it’s the engaging story of Bilodo, a Montreal postman with a naughty habit of steaming open various people’s mail. He soon becomes obsessed with the haiku exchange between a certain Gaston Grandpré and his pen pal in Guadeloupe, Ségolène. When Grandpré dies a violent death, Bilodo decides to impersonate him and take over the correspondence. He learns to write poetry – as Thériault had to, to write this – and their haiku (“the art of the snapshot, the detail”) and tanka grow increasingly erotic and take over his life, even supplanting his career. But when Ségolène offers to fly to Canada, Bilodo panics. I had two major problems with this: the exoticizing of a Black woman (why did she have to be from Guadeloupe, of all places?), and the bizarre ending, in which Bilodo, who has gradually become more like Grandpré, seems destined for his fate as well. I imagine this was supposed to be a psychological fable, but it was just a little bit silly for me, and the way it’s marketed will probably disappoint readers who are looking for either Harold Fry heart warming or cute Japanese cat/phone box adventures. (Public library) [108 pages] 
Which of these catches your eye?
Thanks for Joining in with Novellas in November! #NovNov24 Statistics
Co-host Cathy and I are delighted that so many of you participated in Novellas in November again this year and helped us to celebrate the art of the short book. We had 46 participants and 173 posts covering more than 150 books.
In total, 16 friends of #NovNov reviewed our buddy read, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which won the Booker Prize partway through the month.
Other books with multiple reviews included John Boyne’s recent novella series, The Party by Tessa Hadley, various by Claire Keegan, Astraea by Kate Kruimink, and Baron Bagge by Alexander Lernet-Holenia.
The link-up will remain open through Saturday 7 December if you would like to add in any belated reviews (I will certainly be doing so).
See you next November – but keep reading novellas and sharing the love all through the year!
Novellas New to My TBR (#NovNov24)
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how busy November can be with blogger challenges, plus life-wise – lots of family birthdays cluster in the month, including my husband’s today. What with a book club social on Wednesday and a belated “Friendsgiving” meal with our next-door neighbour yesterday, it’s been a packed week. Today we had lunch out at a fine dining restaurant in the countryside and I’ve made him a maple and pecan cake. With Advent starting tomorrow, suddenly it feels like Christmas is just around the corner and there’s far too much to get done before the end of the year.
As usual, I come to the close of November still frantically trying to finish the many novellas I started at some point in the month, so although I will post an overall roundup with collective statistics tomorrow, my plan is to keep the final Inlinkz party open through 7 December and continue writing up novellas as I finish them, with next Saturday as my absolute deadline.
Here are some novellas I’ve added to my TBR this month:
Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker, recommended by Margaret (From Pyrenees to Pennines) and seconded by Marcie (Buried in Print) in comments
The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse, recommended by Karen (reviewed at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings)
Including some 2025 releases that are now on my radar…
through NetGalley:
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (February 2025)
via the author’s Substack:
Breasts: A Relatively Brief Relationship by Jean Hannah Edelstein (April 2025)
and as Shelf Awareness review options:
The Cannibal Owl by Aaron Gwyn (January 2025)
The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica (March 2025)
Whew, six isn’t too overwhelming!
Interview with Neil Griffiths of Weatherglass Books (#NovNov24)
Back in September, I attended a great “The Future of the Novella” event in London, hosted by Weatherglass. I wrote about it here, and earlier this month I reviewed the first of the two winners of the inaugural Weatherglass Novella Prize, Astraea by Kate Kruimink*. Weatherglass Books co-founder and novelist Neil Griffiths kindly sent review copies of both winning books, and agreed to answer some questions over e-mail.
Samantha Harvey’s 136-page Orbital won the Booker Prize, the film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is in cinemas: Is the novella having a moment? If so, how do you account for its fresh prominence? Or has it always been a powerful form and we’re realizing it anew?
I do wonder whether Orbital is a novella, by which I mean, number of pages can be deceptive – there are a lot of words per page! I think it probably sneaks in under our Novella Prize max word count: under 40K. Also, I wonder whether Small Things like These would make it over our minimum 20K. I don’t think so. But what I think we can say is that there is something happening around length.
My co-founder of Weatherglass, Damian Lanigan, says this: “the novella is the form for our times: befitting our short attention spans, but also with its tight focus, with its singular atmosphere – it’s the ideal form for glimpsing something essential about the world and ourselves in an increasingly chaotic world.”
But then if we look over the history of the prose fiction over the last 200 hundred years, there are so many novellas that have defined an era: Turgenev’s Love, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Carr’s A Month in the Country, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Why did Weatherglass choose to focus on short books? Do economic and environmental factors come into it (short books = less paper = lower printing costs as well as fewer trees cut down)?
Economic and environmental factors play a role, but there is also craft. Writers need to ask themselves the question: does this story need to be this length, and the answer is, more often than not: no. I think constraints bring the best out of writers. If a novel comes in at 70K words, our first thought is to cut 10K. (I should say, my last novel, very kindly reviewed by yourself, was a whooping 190K words. It should have been 150K! Since then I’ve written two pieces of fiction, both under 35K.)
Neil Griffiths
We’ve heard about the bloating of films, that they’re something like 20% longer on average than they were 40 years ago; will books take the opposite trajectory? Can a one-sitting read compete with a film?
I don’t think I’ve ever read even the shortest novella in one sitting. I need time to reflect. I don’t think comparing the two forms is helpful because they require different things of us. Take music: Morton Feldman’s 2nd String Quartet is 5 hours long, without a break. I’d commit to that in the concert hall, but I couldn’t read for 5 hours without a break or sit through a film.
How did you bring Ali Smith on board as the judge for the first two years of the Weatherglass Novella Prize? There was a blind judging process and you ended up with an all-female shortlist in the inaugural year. Do you have a theory as to why?
Ali Smith
Damian kept saying Ali Smith would be the best judge and I kept saying “but how do we get to her?” Then someone told me they had her email address. I didn’t expect to get an answer. A ‘Yes’ came an hour later. She’s been wonderful to work with. And she’s enjoyed it so much she’s agreed to do it ongoingly.
I do think the shortlist question is an important one. Certainly we don’t have to ask ourselves any questions when it’s an all-female short list, but we would if it was all-male. What does that say? I don’t know why the strongest were by women.
Do you have any personal favourite novellas?
A Month in the Country might be the exemplar of the form for me. But there is a little-read novella by Tolstoy, Hadji Murat, which is also close to perfect. More contemporaneously, Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts. And I’m pleased to say: all three novellas we’re publishing from our inaugural prize are up there: Astraea, Aerth and We Hexed the Moon.
*Though it won’t be published until 25 January, I have a finished copy of the other winner, Aerth by Deborah Tomkins, a novella-in-flash set on alternative earths and incorporating second- and third-person narration and various formats. I’ve been enjoying it so far and hope to review it soon as my first recommendation for 2025.
Three Object Lessons Books for #NovNov24 & #NonfictionNovember (Frith, Hanna, Lobdell)
Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series “is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.” (I have previously reviewed Doctor, Dust, Grave, Pregnancy Test, and Recipe.) I love how interdisciplinary these short nonfiction works are, combining history and pop culture and often incorporating science or medicine, too. Here are my thoughts on three 2024 additions to the series.
Barcode by Jordan Frith: The barcode was patented in 1952 but didn’t come into daily use until 1974. It was developed for use by supermarkets – the Universal Product Code or UPC. (These days a charity shop is the only place you might have a shopping experience that doesn’t rely on barcodes.) A grocery industry committee chose between seven designs, two of which were round. IBM’s design won and became the barcode as we know it. “Barcodes are a bit of a paradox,” Frith, a communications professor with previous books on RFID and smartphones to his name, writes. “They are ignored yet iconic. They are a prime example of the learned invisibility of infrastructure yet also a prominent symbol of cultural critique in everything from popular science fiction to tattoos.” In 1992, President Bush was considered to be out of touch when he expressed amazement at barcode scanning technology. I was most engaged with the chapter on the Bible – Evangelicals, famously, panicked that the Mark of the Beast heralded by the book of Revelation would be an obligatory barcode tattooed on every individual. While I’m not interested enough in technology to have read the whole thing, which does skew dry, I found interesting tidbits by skimming. (Public library) [152 pages]
Island by Julian Hanna: The most autobiographical, loosest and least formulaic of these three, and perhaps my favourite in the series to date. Hanna grew up on Vancouver Island and has lived on Madeira; his genealogy stretches back to another island nation, Ireland. Through disparate travels he comments on islands that have long attracted expats: Hawaii, Ibiza, and Hong Kong. From sweltering Crete to the polar night, from family legend to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the topics are as various as the settings. Although Hanna is a humanities lecturer, he even gets involved in designing a gravity battery for Eday in the Orkneys (fully powered by renewables), having won funding through a sustainable energy prize, and is part of a team that builds one in situ there in three days. I admired the honest exploration of the positives and negatives of islands. An island can promise paradise, a time out of time, “a refuge for eccentrics.” Equally, it can be a site of isolation, of “domination and exploitation of fellow humans and of nature.” We may think that with the Internet the world has gotten smaller, but islands are still bastions of distinct culture. In an era of climate crisis, though, some will literally cease to exist. Written primarily during the Covid years, the book contrasts the often personal realities of death, grief and loneliness with idyllic desert-island visions. Whimsically, Hanna presents each chapter as a message in a bottle. What a different book this would have been if written by, say, a geographer. (Read via Edelweiss) [180 pages] 
X-Ray by Nicole Lobdell: X-ray technology has been with us since 1895, when it was developed by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen. He received the first Nobel Prize in physics but never made any money off of his discovery and died in penury of a cancer that likely resulted from his work. From the start, X-rays provoked concerns about voyeurism. People were right to be wary of X-rays in those early days, but radiation was more of a danger than the invasion of privacy. Lobdell, an English professor, tends to draw slightly simplistic metaphorical messages about the secrets of the body. But X-rays make so many fascinating cultural appearances that I could forgive the occasional lack of subtlety. There’s an in-depth discussion of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, and Superman was only one of the comic-book heroes to boast X-ray vision. The technology has been used to measure feet for shoes, reveal the hidden history of paintings, and keep air travellers safe. I went in for a hospital X-ray of my foot not long after reading this. It was such a quick and simple process, as you’ll find at the dentist’s office as well, and safe enough that my radiographer was pregnant. (Read via Edelweiss) [152 pages] 
Short, Soul-Soothing Reads for #NovNov24 & #NonfictionNovember: Barnes, Cognetti, Lende, Mann, Nouwen and Winner
After the catastrophic U.S. election results (which we’ve all managed to ignore or normalize so as to keep going with our lives) and a medical crisis with our dear old cat, I’ve been craving literary soul food. These six short nonfiction books have been good companions, promising love, meaning and transcendence in the midst of bereavement and daily routines.
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes (2013)
Barnes was a favourite author in my twenties and thirties, though I’ve had less success with his recent work. He wrote a few grief-soaked books in the wake of the death of his wife, celebrated literary agent Pat Kavanagh*. I had this mistaken for a different one (Through the Window, I think?) that I had enjoyed more. No matter; it was still interesting to reread this triptych of auto/biographical essays. The final, personal piece, “The Loss of Depth,” is a classic of bereavement literature on par with C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed; I would happily take it as a standalone pamphlet. Its every word rings true, especially the sense of duty as the lost one’s “principal rememberer.” But the overarching ballooning metaphor, and links with early French aerial photographer Nadar and Colonel Fred Burnaby, aeronaut and suitor of Sarah Bernhardt, don’t convince. The strategy feels like a rehearsal for Richard Flanagan’s Baillie Gifford Prize-winning Question 7, a similar hybrid work that pulls it off better. (Little Free Library) [118 pages]
*In spring 2008, I attended a talk by John Irving at King’s College, London, where I worked in library services for five years. Barnes and Kavanagh were in the front row and embraced Irving before the start. I was floored to hear of Kavanagh’s death later that year because she’d looked so well. It was a fast-acting brain tumour that felled her just 37 days after diagnosis.
Without Ever Reaching the Summit by Paolo Cognetti (2018; 2020)
[Translated from the Italian by Stash Luczkiw]
Part pilgrimage and part 40th birthday treat, Cognetti’s October 2017 Himalayan trek through Dolpo (a Nepalese plateau at the Tibetan border) would also somewhat recreate Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. Cognetti struggles with altitude sickness and the fare: “I tried salted yak butter tea for the first time—nauseating if you thought you were drinking tea, good and refreshing if you thought you were drinking broth.” He and his companions fancifully decide that Kanjiroba, the lovable stray dog who joins their party, is a reincarnation of Matthiessen. I have limited tolerance for travel books’ episodic combinations of nature descriptions, anthropological observations, and the rigours of the nomadic lifestyle. The same was true here, but the slight spiritual aspect and references to The Snow Leopard lifted it. (Public library) [135 pages]
Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer by Heather Lende (2015)
Lende is a journalist in isolated Haines, Alaska (population: 2,000). There’s a plucky motivational bent to these mini-essays about small-town life and death. In writing obituaries for normal, flawed people, she is reminded of what matters most: family (she’s a mother of five, one adopted, and a grandmother; she includes beloved pets in this category) and vocation. The title phrase is the motto she lives by. “I believe gratitude comes from a place in your soul that knows the story could have ended differently, and often does, and I also know that gratitude is at the heart of finding the good in this world—especially in our relationships with the ones we love.” The anecdotes and morals are sweet if not groundbreaking. The pocket-sized hardback might appeal to readers of Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Strout. (Birthday gift from my wish list, secondhand) [162 pages]
Do Not Be Afraid: The joy of waiting in a time of fear by Rachel Mann (2024)
This is the Archbishop of York’s Advent Book 2024; I read it early because, pre-election, I yearned for its message of courage and patience. We need it all the more now. The bite-sized essays are designed to be read one per day from the first Sunday of Advent through to Christmas Day. Often they include a passage of scripture or poetry (including some of Mann’s own) for meditation, and each entry closes with a short prayer and a few questions for discussion or private contemplation. The topics are a real variety but mostly draw on the author’s own experiences of waiting and suffering: medical appointments and Covid isolation as well as the everyday loneliness of being single and the pain of coping with chronic illness. She writes about sitting with parishioners as they face death and bereavement. But there are also pieces inspired by popular culture – everything from Strictly to Quentin Tarantino.
Mann has written several previous Lent course books based on films. I’ve read her work in multiple genres (poetry: A Kingdom of Love and Eleanor Among the Saints; literary criticism: In the Bleak Midwinter; memoir: Dazzling Darkness; fiction: The Gospel of Eve); she is such a versatile writer, and with a fascinating story as a trans priest. Sombre yet hopeful, this is recommended seasonal reading. [114 pages]
With thanks to SPCK for the free copy for review.
The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom by Henri J. M. Nouwen (1997)
Anguish is a strong word; I haven’t done any biographical digging to figure out what was going on in Nouwen’s life to prompt it, but apparently this secret journal came out of a lost relationship. (I wonder if it could have been a homosexual attachment. Nouwen was a Dutch Roman Catholic priest who became the pastor of a community for disabled adults in Canada.) He didn’t publish for another eight years but friends encouraged him to let his experience aid others. The one- or two-page reflections are written in the second person, so they feel like a self-help pep talk. The recurring themes are overcoming abandonment and rejection, relinquishing control, and trusting in God’s love and faithfulness. “You must stop being a pleaser and reclaim your identity as a free self.” The point about needing to integrate rather than sideline psychological pain is one I’m sure any therapist would affirm. Nouwen writes that a new spirituality of the body is necessary. This was a comforting bedside book with lots of passages that resonated. (Free – withdrawn from church theological library) [98 pages]
Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline by Lauren F. Winner (2003)
After Winner converted from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity, she found that she missed how Jewish rituals make routine events sacred. There are Christian sacraments, of course, but this book is about how the wisdom of another tradition might be applied in a new context. “Judaism offers opportunities for people to inhabit and sanctify bodies and bodily practices,” Winner writes. There are chapters on the concept of the Sabbath, wedding ceremonies, prayer and hospitality. Fasting is a particular sticking point for Winner, but her priest encourages her to see it as a way of demonstrating dependence on, and hunger for, God. I most appreciated the sections on mourning and ageing. “Perhaps the most essential insight of the Jewish approach to caring for one’s elderly is that this care is, indeed, an obligation. What Judaism understands is that obligations are good things. They are the very bedrock of the Jew’s relationship to God, and they govern some of the most fundamental human relationships”. By the way, Mudhouse is Winner’s local coffeehouse, so she believes these disciplines can be undertaken anywhere. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) [142 pages]
The Party by Tessa Hadley (Blog Tour and #NovNov24)
You can count on Tessa Hadley for atmospheric, sophisticated stories of familial and romantic relationships in mid- to late-twentieth-century England. The Party is a novella of sisters Moira and Evelyn, university students on the cusp of womanhood. In 1950s Bristol, the Second World War casts a long shadow and new conflicts loom – Moira’s former beau was sent to Malaya. Suave as they try to seem, with Evelyn peppering her speech with the phrases she’s learning in the first year of her French degree, the girls can’t hide their origins in the Northeast. When Evelyn joins Moira at an art students’ party in a pub, fashionable outfits make them look older and more confident than they really are. Evelyn admits to her classmate, Donald, “I’m always disappointed at parties. I long to be, you know, a succès fou, but I never am.” Then the sisters meet Paul and Sinden, who flatter them by taking an interest; they are attracted to the men’s worldly wise air but also find them oddly odious.
The novella’s three chapters each revolve around a party. First is the Bristol dockside pub party (published as a short story in the New Yorker); second is a cocktail party the girls’ parents are preparing for, giving us a window onto their troubled marriage; finally is a gathering Paul invites them to at the shabby inherited mansion he lives in with his cousin, invalid brother, and louche sister. “We camp in it like kids,” Paul says. “Just playing at being grown up, you know.” During their night spent at the mansion, the sisters become painfully aware of the class difference between them and Paul’s moneyed family. The divide between innocence and experience may be sharp, but the line between love and hatred is not always as clear as they expected. And from moments of decision all the rest of life flows.
In her novels and story collections, Hadley often writes about strained families, young women on the edge, and the way sex can force a change in direction. This was my eighth time reading her, and though The Party is as stylish as all her work, it didn’t particularly stand out for me, lacking the depth of her novels and the concentration of her stories. Still, it would be a good introduction to Hadley or, if you’re an established fan like me, you could read it in a sitting and be reminded of her sharp eye for manners and pretensions – and the emotions they mask.
[115 pages]
With thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Buy The Party from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was delighted to be part of the blog tour for The Party. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will appear soon.
#NovNov24 Halfway Check-In & Small Things Like These Film Review
Somehow half of November has flown by. We hope you’ve been enjoying reading and reviewing short books this month. So far we have had 40 participants and 84 posts! Remember to add your posts to the link-up, or alert us via a comment here or on Bluesky (@cathybrown746.bsky.social / @bookishbeck.bsky.social), Instagram (@cathy_746books / @bookishbeck), or X (@cathy746books / @bookishbeck).
If you haven’t already, there’s no better time to pick up our buddy read, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which won the Booker Prize on Tuesday evening. Chair of judges Edmund de Waal said it is “about a wounded world” and that the panel’s “unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition.” I was surprised to learn that it is only the second-shortest Booker winner; Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald is even shorter.
Another popular novella many of us have read is Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (my latest review is here). I went to see the excellent film adaptation, with a few friends from book club, at our tiny local arthouse cinema on Wednesday afternoon. I’ve read the book twice now – I might just read it a third time before Christmas – and from memory the film is remarkably faithful to its storyline and scope. (The only significant change I think of is that Bill doesn’t visit Ned in the hospital, but there are still flashbacks to the role that Ned played in Bill’s early life.)
The casting and cinematography are exceptional. Cillian Murphy portrays Bill with just the right blend of stoicism, meekness, and angst. Emily Watson is chilling as Sister Mary, the Mother Superior of the convent, which is suitably creepy with dim brick hallways and clinical laundry rooms. The grimy cobbles and dull streetlamps of the town contrast with the warm light in the scenes of Bill’s remembered childhood at Mrs Wilson’s. Repeated shots – of Bill’s truck setting off across the bridge in the early morning, of him scrubbing coal dust from his hands with carbolic soap, of his eyes wide open in the middle of the night – are not recursive but a way of establishing the gruelling nature of his tasks and the unease that plagues him. A life of physical labour has aged him beyond 39 (cf. Murphy is 48) and he’s in pain from shouldering sacks of coal day in and day out.
Both book and film are set in 1985 but apart from the fashions and the kitschy Christmas decorations and window dressings you’d be excused for thinking it was the 1950s. Bill’s business deals in coal, peat and tinder; rural Ireland really was that economically depressed and technologically constrained. (Another Ireland-set film I saw last year, The Miracle Club, is visually very similar – it even features two of the same actors – although it takes place in 1967. It’s as if nothing changed for decades.)
By its nature, the film has to be a little more overt about what Bill is feeling (and generally not saying, as he is such a quiet man): there are tears at Murphy’s eyes and anxious breathing to make Bill’s state of mind obvious. Yet the film retains much of the subtlety of Keegan’s novella. You have to listen carefully during the conversation between Bill and Sister Mary to understand she is attempting to blackmail him into silence about what goes on at the convent.
At the end of the film showing, you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was stunned at the simple beauty of the final scene, and the statistics its story is based on. It’s truly astonishing that Magdalene Laundries were in operation until the late 1990s, with Church support. Rage and sorrow build in you at the very thought, but Bill’s quietly heroic act of resistance is an inspiration. What might we, ordinary people all, be called on to do for women, the poor, and the oppressed in the years to come? We have no excuse not to advocate for them.
(Arti of Ripple Effects has also reviewed the film here.)
So far this month I’ve read nine novellas and reviewed eight. One of these was a one-sitting read, and I have another pile of ones that I could potentially read of a morning or evening next week. I’m currently reading another 16 … it remains to be seen whether I will average one a day for the month!
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (#NovNov24 Buddy Read)
Orbital is a circadian narrative, but its one day contains multitudes. Every 90 minutes, a spacecraft completes an orbit of the Earth; the 24 hours the astronauts experience equate to 16 days. And in the same way, this Booker Prize-shortlisted novella contains much more than seems possible for its page length. It plays with scale, zooming from the cosmic down to the human, then back. The situation is simultaneously extraordinary and routine:
Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more[.]
We see these characters – Anton, Roman, Nell, Chie, Shaun, and Pietro – going about daily life as they approach the moon: taking readings, recording data on their health and lab mice’s, exercising, conversing over packaged foods, watching a film, then getting back into the sleeping bags where they started the day. Apart from occasional messages from family, theirs is a completely separate, closed-off existence. Is it magical or claustrophobic? Godlike, they cast benevolent eyes over a whole planet, yet their thoughts are always with the two or three individual humans who mean most to them. A wife, a daughter, a mother who has just died.
Apart from the bereaved astronaut – the one I sympathized with most – I didn’t get a strong sense of the characters as individuals. This may have been deliberate on Harvey’s part, to emphasize how reliant the six are on each other for survival: “we are one. Everything we have up here is only what we reuse and share. … We drink each other’s recycled urine. We breathe each other’s recycled air.” That collectivity and the overt messaging give the book the air of a parable.
Maybe it’s hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the centre of it all to knowing in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerably many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse.
Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once … Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all.
Gaining perspective on humankind is always valuable. There is also a strong environmental warning here. “The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies”. The astronauts observe climate breakdown firsthand through the inexorable development of a super-typhoon over the Philippines.
There are some stunning lyrical passages (“We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being … This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast”), but Harvey sometimes gets carried away with the sound of words or the sweep of imagery, such that the style threatens to overwhelm the import. This was especially true of the last line. At times, I felt I was watching a BBC nature documentary full of soaring panoramas and time-lapse shots, all choreographed to an ethereal Sigur Rós soundtrack. Am I a cynic for saying so? I confess I don’t think this will win the Booker. But for the most part, I was entranced; grateful for the peek at the immensity of space, the wonder of Earth, and the fragility of human beings. (Public library)
[136 pages]
Mini playlist:
- “Space Walk” by Lemon Jelly
- “Spacewalk” by Bell X1
- “Magic” & “Wonder” by Gungor
- “Hoppípolla” by Sigur Rós
- “Little Astronaut” by Jim Molyneux and Spell Songs
Never fear, others have been more enthusiastic!
Reviewed for this challenge so far by:
A Bag Full of Stories (Susana)
Book Chatter (Tina)
Books Are My Favourite and Best (Kate)
Buried in Print (Marcie)
Calmgrove (Chris)
The Intrepid Angeleno (Jinjer)
My Head Is Full of Books (Anne)
Words and Peace (Emma)
Reviewed earlier by other participants and friends:
Novellas in November 2024 Link-Up (#NovNov24)
Happy November! It’s the fifth year that Cathy of 746 Books and I have been co-hosting Novellas in November. We hope you’ll enjoy reading and reviewing one or more short books this month.
Maybe you’d like to start with a My Year in Novellas retrospective looking back at any novellas you have read since last November (I’ll post mine tomorrow), or you could join in with our Booker Prize-winning buddy read, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
This post will be pinned to the top of my site all through the month. I’ll add in more link parties as necessary.
Keep in touch via Bluesky (@cathybrown746.bsky.social / @bookishbeck.bsky.social), Instagram (@cathy_746books / @bookishbeck), and X (@cathy746books / @bookishbeck) and do use the feature images plus our new hashtag, #NovNov24.
Have a look at all the posts that have gone up so far!
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
